Information’s Role in Using Social

Marketing to Curb Addictions.

For as long as humanity has been aware of intoxicating and addictive

substances, they have been a massive part of our culture. In fact, according to

research published by Tammy Saah in the harm reduction journal, there is

evidence that a drug's ability to cause a perception of reduced risk or harm while

providing a reward to our dopamine system has played a hand in our very

evolution. Given this, it is no surprise that drug use and addiction is widespread

in developing and developed nations alike. This widespread addiction, however,

has been shown to be a net detriment to our society due to the negative physical

and mental health effects inherent to the disease known as addiction.

Unfortunately, due to the cannibalistic nature of corporate greed, information that

would stave off others from becoming addicted to dangerous substances is

withheld and intentionally concealed to the consumer until they have become

addicted. This lack of information is not only a large part of what is driving

addiction rates so high, but it is also the reason why many addicts are unable to

seek help due to the harmful negative stigma associated with addiction.

In response to this, there has been a massive social push against the drug and

alcohol industries in an attempt to reduce the net harm done upon not only the

consenting adults consuming these drugs, but also the effects on children and

teenagers participating both willingly and unwillingly in things like second hand

smoke and abuse caused by addicted parents. These social marketing

campaigns have been acting in direct competition with tobacco and drug
companies who are shirking corporate social responsibility and actively doing

harm to struggling communities by concealing said harms. In a far more sinister

light, pharmaceutical companies have been shown to use the principles of social

marketing, as well as this concealment of information, to do the opposite of what

corporate social responsibility would entail. Offering doctors incentives to

recommend addictive and dangerous opioids to the uninformed in order to cause

even more drug addiction. This research paper intends to explore the

antagonistic, competitive nature present in the history of using social marketing

to curb addictions, specifically in regards to the control of information.

There are multiple theories as to why drugs are so addictive. According to

Kashyap, teenagers and the more younger addicts are made such by social

pressures from external forces. The desire to look “cool” and the impressionable

nature of a child’s mind makes them easy prey for the manipulation of the

tobacco industry in particular. Kashyap goes on to argue that due to the social

nature behind many teens beginning smoking, this problem could also be

counteracted using means of social marketing to make smoking more “uncool”.

This is supported by a journal article by Jones and Salzman that links the new

massive rise in teen tobacco product use to the sleek and modern design in part.

In this article, Jones and Salzman show a model demonstrating the

“renormalization of smoking”. This graph shows a gigantic spike in the number of

adolescent students who report tobacco use, primarily for vape products in 2017.
In this image, a jump from 10% to 20% can be seen in teen vaping use over just

three years.

(Image source Cullen KA, Ambrose BK, Gentzke AS, Apelberg BJ, Jamal A, King BA. Notes from the Field: Use of

Electronic Cigarettes and Any Tobacco Products Among Middle and High School Students – United States, 2011–

2018.

These sources support the conclusion that, at

least in regards to tobacco use among

teenagers, there is an aspect of the marketing of

drugs that accounts for and exploits the

impressionable nature of youth. If such is the

case, it shows the dire straits and challenges

posed to using social marketing to curb such

addictions. Society has known about the harm

caused by cigarettes for decades, and at the beginning point of e-cigarettes'

introduction, it can be seen that even while this e-cigarette use was going up

prior to 2015, the overall use of tobacco products among youth was steadily

declining. An argument could be made that the trends were moving towards the

elimination of teen smoking until 2017. It’s no coincidence, then, that the launch

of sleek vaping products like the Juul came about in 2015, quickly expanding to

the point where governments were forced to take legal action against vaping

products.
Allow us now to look at the social marketing employed by vaping producer

companies such as Juul, Smok, and Suoren. In Juul’s case, it should be

mentioned that more than a third of the company is owned by Altria, the company

that owns Marlborough. In the twilight years of the decline of cigarettes among

teens, the tobacco giant has spread it’s net wider to extend to vaping companies.

In earlier years, vaping companies skirted many international cigarette

advertising laws due to technicalities. Even today in Canada, vapes and e-liquid

only need to bear a warning that they contain nicotine, an addictive chemical.

Unfortunately, in the Missouri Medicine Journal, Salzman cites a study by

Morean and Bold stating that 39% of teenagers didn’t know or didn’t consider

JUULs to be e cigarettes at all, and 63% of teenagers had no idea that JUUL

contained any nicotine at all. Knowing this, vaping companies added the

minimum warning required of them and advertised very specifically that vapes

were in no way, shape or form, a cigarette. This is a direct way of circumventing

a hither-to outstanding approach by social marketers known as the picture-

warning regulations. In 2012, Canada became the first country to require these

photographic warnings and images of the negative effects caused by smoking. In

these images, disgusting and off putting effects of cigarette usage was displayed

in order to warn away new smokers as well as making smoking addicts think

twice about their behavior. This was an excellent example of the government

sector placing regulations on distributors in order to protect consumers. The

vaping industry, which, again, is owned in large part by the cigarette industry,
exploited this lack of knowledge in order to addict the growing youth market to

their products when the youth opinion of cigarettes was reaching an all time low.

They did this by taking advantage of a gap in the law caused by new products to

successfully bring more nicotine addicts in than ever before, with less knowledge

of what the long term outcome will be.

It shouldn’t be understated that the social marketing campaign of putting these

unnerving images on cigarettes was extremely effective, a research article by

Hammond and Fong found that smokers that had seen these warning labels

were “significantly more likely to endorse health risks” than those who hadn’t.

Using this information, they concluded that there is a massive issue in which

smokers are not being properly informed of all of the risks that are associated

with smoking. Giving people all of the information about cigarettes undeniably led

to a decline in the overall purchasing and led to this social marketing regulation

reducing the harm caused by cigarettes. Misinformation and lack of information

regarding addictive substances is one of the main tools drug companies use to

push their substances on the market, so it’s no surprise that one of their most

effective strategies was to subvert the law that required them to give out this

information. While social marketing is generally applied with the notion of

improving the society it is performed in, it is not untrue to say that this control of

information is in and of itself a form of negative social marketing that I will now

coin as Anti-social marketing for the remainder of this paper. Anti-social

marketing is the act or use of social marketing to achieve behavioral change that

benefits the social marketer, and provides either no benefit or a net negative

effect to those being marketed to. The tobacco industry uses anti-social

marketing in order to restrict access to information that would turn customers

away, which in my opinion is one of the more tame forms of anti-social

marketing. The terrifying part of all of this, is that all of these actions are perfectly

legal, so what happens when drug companies decide not to worry about the

legality? What happens when the drug being sold is far more dangerous than

nicotine? The answer, unfortunately, has already presented itself before and

throughout the vaping craze. Opioids.

The opioid epidemic is a dark topic that still plagues most countries to this day.

As we learned in class, opioid overdoses have killed over 300,000 people since

2000 and are predominantly killing thousands every year. In this example, the

government sector is much more prominent than in the tobacco industry due to

the more violent and sudden nature of overdoses. In a more illegal display of

anti-social marketing, opioids were marketed for chronic pain, in which they are

not meant to be used for. Disregarding many laws and regulations about both the

advertising, as well as the branding of the products and the very laws around

drug control, opioid cartels and distributing/manufacturing companies engaged in

Anti-social marketing in order to affect behavioral change towards the use of

opioids. Using the trust society has for their doctors, drug manufacturers caused
addiction rates to skyrocket, followed closely by overdose rates. This is another

example of information being withheld by trusted sources in order to turn a profit.

In response from the government sector, in addition to major legal crackdowns

on the law-breaking aspects of the opioid crisis, governments launched massive

social marketing campaigns to help reduce not only opioid use, but also around

the stigma associated with opioids. This stigma, as explored in Lavack’s “Using

social marketing to de-stigmatize addiction”, is partially a remnant of the war on

drugs, a social marketing campaign begun by Ronald Reagan, in which terms

such as drug-addict were eventually turned into derogatory labels. Not only that,

but Lavack further details that the shame of being “in treatment” and the fact that

most people still don’t fully accept recovering addicts is a massive barrier to

affecting behavioral change towards seeking help for addiction. In Lavack’s

article, she mentions a few social marketing campaigns used to eliminate stigma

in the UK and the US, which by proxy can be seen as social marketing uses to

curb the destructiveness of addiction. Such examples include the SPAM

campaign in the UK, (Stigma, Prejudice, Anger and Misunderstanding), as well

as the Canadian Community based Anti Stigma Campaign of the 2000’s. These

campaigns, through extensive research, found that the best way to help alleviate

the impacts of stigma and it’s presence in general was better education on the

topic at large. The campaigns recommended focusing on media biases and

focused on the promotion of understanding, and changing behavior through said

understanding.

Harmful and addictive drugs prey on society’s lack of education about the

dangers, be it the teenagers who don’t comprehend the long term effects of

smoking, the opioid epidemics’ use of trusted doctors and uneducated masses,

or the stigmatization around addiction being fuelled by misunderstanding. With all

these horrible things, what can we do to combat it? We can spread information.

The greatest tool a social marketer has ever known is the ability to spread

information to affect behavioral change. Through proper education of the

masses, addiction is an issue that can be curbed in our society. Shown by the

results of the cigarette picture warnings campaign, SPAM, and the CCASC,

education is a massive part of the fight against addiction and already show that

brilliant social marketers are on the case at this very moment.

Bibliography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inDI06DXVjg&t=18s
Canadian ad for opioid crisis
Morean ME, Bold KW, Kong G, et al. Adolescents’ awareness of the nicotine strength
and e-cigarette status of JUUL e-cigarettes. Drug and Alcohol Dependence. 2019

Herzberg, D. L. (2020). White Market Drugs Big Pharma and the hidden history of
addiction in America. The University of Chicago Press.

Hammond, D., Fong, G. T., McNeill, A., Borland, R., & Cummings, K. M. (2006).
Effectiveness of cigarette warning labels in informing smokers about the risks of
smoking: findings from the International Tobacco Control (ITC) Four Country Survey.
Tobacco control, 15 Suppl 3(Suppl 3), iii19–iii25. https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.2005.012294
Lavack, Anne M. (2007), “Using Social Marketing to De-Stigmatize
Addictions: A Review,” Addiction Research and Theory, 15(5), 479-492.

O'Callaghan, F. V. (2003). Smoking among a sample of Australian teenagers:

Perceptions of social and health consequences. South Pacific Journal of
Psychology, 14, 8–15.

Kashyap, Siddharth. (2021), “Smoking Among Teenagers with Emphasis on

Social Marketing as a Solution” International Journal of Research Publication and
Reviews, 2, 964-968

Cutler, Bob D. Thomas, Edward G. “This is Your Brain on Drugs, A Review of the
Marketing Literature on Alcohol/Drug Abuse.” Health Marketing Quarterly, 11, 3-4.
Saah, T. The evolutionary origins and significance of drug addiction. Harm
Reduct J 2, 8 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7517-2-8

Jones, K., & Salzman, G. A. (2020). The Vaping Epidemic in Adolescents. Missouri
medicine, 117(1), 56–58.